It’s been a year since I wrote Beautiful Twitter Sunsets, and roughly a year since the ownership and management change over on Twitter-that-was, and after something like 13 years on that site (and who knows how many words written) I have deleted my account. My accounts, actually, I had more than one. The alts rarely updated but one was “Available Quests”, a handle that posted D&D, table-top appropriate quests like some kind of guild job board and the other was “Timeline Operations”, a customer service account for time travelers stuck in this awful splinter timeline. TimelineOps was always a fun character to step into and the jokes mostly wrote themselves as I interacted with people.

Anyway, both of those and the main account deleted.

Like everyone else, I am waiting to see what comes next. Mastodon is probably the technical (and tech) leader in this race but has a horrible brand, a fractured user base, and something of a reputation among the folks who haven’t used it yet. The ActivityPub protocol is the key jewel in Mastodon’s potential social media crown, but we’re still waiting for another major player to implement it [Tumblr, maybe?] or for someone to build a new app and website from scratch that will federate with Masto and the rest using ActivityPub, while also resonating enough with users that it gains traction.

The other ‘open’ option that is 1. not open, 2. wholly owned by a private company, and 3. actually gaining some mindshare out there is Bluesky. Bluesky, or bsky.app, is using the AT Protocol (yes, they capitalize it even though you’re supposed to say “at protocol”, not sound out “A. T.”) which is similar to ActivityPub in that it will allow different platforms to cross post and ‘federate’ and let you take your online social presence with you to whichever platform you’d prefer (that uses the AT Protocol). Except that the AT doesn’t connect to anything and no one else is using it. Bluesky is succeeding where a number of other platforms ain’t by basically looking like and acting almost exactly like twitter from, say, 2017 while also restricting access behind invite codes while they go through their “Beta”. The first batch of invites went out to journalists and a few other heavy hitters so they’ve managed to make a site that you’d want to read with accounts that you’d probably like to follow and then immediately closed the door to everyone, only opening it a crack.

It was just six weeks ago that Bluesky hit a million users, despite technically being around since 2019. It could probably grow to ten times that size in another six weeks if they opened the door to everyone, but the folks that run Bluesky are being very careful. Users are great but users are also the worst thing about a lot of social media.

If you go to the bottom of this web page you’ll find links to my accounts on both of these new platforms¹. I’m spending more time right now on Bluesky and will probably be active there for the foreseeable. Though the social media I probably have more fun using is Tumblr, which is kind of hilarious since I was on Tumblr even before making a twitter account in 2010. Everything old is new again.

Twitter-that-was: You were awful, and then somehow over the past year you got worse. You will not be missed; mourned a little, maybe, because you were a part of our lives for quite a long time, but not missed.

There’s not a replacement yet. Like everyone else, I’m still waiting to see where we all land.

¹ The Links section is baked into the CMS and almost trivial to update, when I remember to update, so if you are reading this in 2 or 3 years time and we’re all on some new second-life VR/AR social media platform called StupidGoggles or TormentNexus or whatever, my account for the latest-greatest social media platform should be down there too.

Some of you have likely noticed that the URL interpunctgames.com redirects to this blog — mostly by clicking a link on one of my online bios and discovering yourself here.

I do have plans. I also need to file a DBA with my local county and get a business license from the local city and some other odds and ends (including actually making a separate web site) and I don’t currently have the luxury of gobs and gobs of free time given the 40 hours a week I spend in other gainful employment.

The non-existence of that separate site seemed like something worth noting, though, so I’ve noted it.

Plans (for 2024)¹ including getting on a regular publishing schedule and providing actual downloads (free on itch.io) on my way toward longer-format products and uniting some of the currently unrelated bits-and-thoughts I have floating inside my head into something larger and more coherent.

More information, or at least some hints, about the 2024 schedule and the over-all plan behind it will be coming later this fall². If you can recall some of my sporadic blog posts from earlier this year I’m working on fantasy maps, among other things, and trying to figure out appropriate map scales and templates. That’s part of it, and will probably be the bigger part, but hopefully I can also drag my undiagnosed lump of brain matter away from hyperfocusing on just that and can also move along other, currently slower moving parts of the project too.

Thanks for reading, and for not kicking me out of your RSS feeds.³

In other housekeeping here on the blog: I’m not sure if this means more regular updates here as well as on the new site. I certainly enjoy sharing my progress and process, and I could certainly be a lot more systematic in how (and how often) I share. We shall see. Watch this space, I guess.

¹ I had similar plans for 2023. and 2022. and, um… yeah ok fine it’s been a while.

² Just a reminder that we just started fall/autumn and ‘later this fall’ is technically any time before 21 December.

³ should I not have mention that? no… wait… don’t do it now…

I thought this was going to be a quick blog post where I digest and recycle a few other fans’ recommendations, “What to watch before Ahsoka” and I’d have a nice little post out late Friday afternoon and a queue that I could catch up on over the weekend. Once I got started, though, it ended up being a much deeper dive into 2010’s era Star Wars on TV, and into the character. And I watched quite a few more episodes of both Clone Wars and Rebels than I expected I would, or would have to.

Before I dive too deep — if you just want a quick TL;DR on what you have to watch before Star Wars: Ahsoka the answer is:

Nah, you’re good. Just watch it.

Rosario Dawson has already shown she understands and can inhabit the character (in The Mandalorian Chapter 13: The Jedi and The Book of Boba Fett Chapter 6: From the Desert Comes a Stranger) and I think we can trust the writers on this one.

Questions like, “Well, who is she?” “Who trained her to be such a bad-ass?” “How did she escape Order 66?” “Wait, she says she’s not a Jedi?” are the sorts of things that are either not too terribly important to telling a new story, or points that will be addressed as she interacts with returning and new characters.

That’s where we’re at. Go. Watch. Don’t sweat the details like some obsessed grognard lore nerd.

[*cough*]

##

The sources I used for this guide include
Clone Wars Episodes in Chronological Order (from StarWars.com)
Tumblr user fullyfancyfan’s Clone Wars Skippable Guide
Murphy’s Multiverse with ‘The Ultimate List of What to Watch Before Ahsoka’
and Reddit’s r/StarWars thread on ‘What should I watch to prepare for Ahsoka?’

…which I found using the google searches “Which clone wars episodes can I skip?” and “What to watch before Ahsoka”

If you’ve seen Clone Wars and Rebels and just need some light reminders [spoilers] about the plots you might also find the Wikipedia pages for Star Wars: Clone Wars Episodes and Star Wars: Rebels Episodes to be handy, if only to read quick summaries of what I’m skipping.

Ahsoka is a creation of Clone Wars¹ so technically you don’t need to watch any of the movies, but I’ll assume you are broadly familiar with the films (any trilogy) and enough of a fan of the broader Star-Wars thing that you’re generally receptive to recommendations. The only two episodes you might want/need to watch of the Disney+ live action Star Wars are linked above.

I’m also going to assume that you want to get up to speed specifically with the story and character of Ahsoka and you don’t have a whole lot of time and also aren’t super into watching 10+ seasons of cgi animated Star Wars just to get there. So one goal is to cut more from the list, not necessarily to include every last appearance of Ahsoka in the shows.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a 2008 ‘film’, given an August theatrical release², but also debuting on Cartoon Network that October. It is probably best to think of it as the first three(-ish) episodes on the series (which began airing weekly on Cartoon Network immediate after, 3 Oct 2008). Ahsoka is voiced in the film & series by Ashley Eckstein.

One thing to note about the Clone Wars cartoon is that episodes weren’t originally presented in what might be called ‘story order’. The vibe is kind of like 1940s news reels from the war front (you’ll get that from the narration at the start of episodes) and for the first three seasons of Clone Wars we were getting bits of this war out of chronological order. It’s why one of the links above is to the watch order guide on StarWars.com; if you wanted to watch all of Clone Wars as a single story, ‘in order’, that resource is available to you. For an Ahsoka-focused list, we’ll be taking some pretty big steps³ but skipping whole story arcs and watching episodes ‘out of order’ is a whole “Clone Wars” thing, as valid as any other recommendation.

So let’s get started. For the Disney+ links below, you’ll need to be a subscriber.

2008 Film: [Stream on Disney+]

Eh, it’s OK. Fine enough if you want to watch it all but we really only need to see the Battle of Christophsis bits, which is a good (re-)introduction to the CW versions of Anakin, Kenobi, the Clones — and Ahsoka.

If you’re ready to keep going and don’t care about the kidnapped hutt kid, stop watching at 26:30

Clone Wars

Season 1, Episode 9 Cloak of Darkness [Stream on Disney+]
…confirming the early characterization of Ahsoka as young, impulsive, and a little snippy.

Season 1, Episode 13 Jedi Crash [Stream on Disney+]
“When Anakin is gravely injured, Ahsoka must take charge”

Season 1, Episode 19 Storm Over Ryloth [Stream on Disney+]
Character development! Storm Over Ryloth is the first of a three episode story arc, but the next two follow other Jedi, not Anakin and Ahsoka.

Season 2, Episode 1 Holocron Heist [Stream on Disney+]
More lessons for an impulsive padawan. Those who like the bounty-hunter and western vibes of the Mandalorian or just a good old-fashioned heist will enjoy this one. The next two episodes, Cargo of Doom [Stream on Disney+] and Children of the Force [Stream on Disney+] finish out the arc if the story hooks you, but those in a hurry can move on.

Season 2, Episode 6 Weapons Factory [Stream on Disney+]
Ahsoka gets paired with Luminara’s padawan Barriss on a mission to sneak into a droid factory and destroy it (while their masters take care of things above ground). A neat contrast here because obviously, Skywalker is not a conventional teacher, so we see how at least one other Jedi-padawan pair operate. Also Barriss is a peer, closer to Ahsoka in age and training, and we get to see that dynamic

Season 2, Episode 11 Lightsaber Lost [Stream on Disney+]
“When Ahsoka’s lightsaber is stolen by a pickpocket, she gets help from the seemingly feeble elder Jedi Tera Sinube as she tracks down the thief.” The Clone Wars writers enjoy pairing Ahsoka with many Jedi Masters, as we’ve seen at least three times already even in this short list. Often these are like Master Sinube, bordering on comedic relief but full of wisdom for our Ahsoka. It’s a recurring ‘bit’ but also good storytelling (and is building Ahsoka as a more complex character, not just Anakin’s 2nd).⁴

This is also a good point to insert some commentary.
How Filoni FIXED Ahsoka in 4 Episodes | Star Wars Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msgQ6WbIHyc
“how Dave Filloni intentionally crafted Ahsoka’s flaws to transform her from a hated newbie into a staple of the franchise.”

Season 2, Episode 22 Lethal Trackdown [Stream on Disney+]
Another pairing, this time with Master Plo Kloon. By this point, the ‘lesson I have to learn’ trope may feel a little overused, especially since we’re skipping around so much to find that particular beat, but I think the more important part is that Ahsoka is learning from so many Jedi, not just Anakin.

Here I will note Episodes 15, 16, & 17 of Season 3. Watch them if you want. I’ll link those at the end — or maybe just in the footnotes⁵ – At least until this arc is ret-conned, it’s Star Wars. For folks who just want to watch the new live action Ahsoka this is a HUGE distraction & not part of my watch list. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you”

Yes you can skip these. Please skip these.

You can also skip these, but they’re solid episodes, and is the two-parter that closed out season three.

Season 3, Episode 21 Padawan Lost [Stream on Disney+]
Season 3, Episode 22 Wookiee Hunt [Stream on Disney+]

Heck at this point we’re done.

You’re good. Watch the new show. There will be more background and backstory but I feel like these ten episodes from the first three seasons are enough to get to know Ahsoka as a character.

…There’s more. Quite a bit more.⁶ I’m trying to respect your time; we’re only four hours in. What’s left is going to take another eight or so hours, and there isn’t another good jumping off point.

Skipping ahead to season five, we have a four episode story arc that is all about Ahsoka and also a pivotal part about her character

Season 5, episode 17 Sabotage [Stream on Disney+]
“Sometimes even the smallest doubt can shake the greatest belief.”

After the events of S5E17, Ahsoka Tano is blamed for a murder, and forced to escape into the Coruscant underworld to prove her innocence. Definitely watch these next three as a block.

Season 5, Episode 18 The Jedi Who Knew Too Much [Stream on Disney+]
Season 5, Episode 19 To Catch a Jedi [Stream on Disney+]
Season 5, Episode 20 The Wrong Jedi [Stream on Disney+]

This arc ends season five. It also ends Clone Wars run on the Cartoon Network. Season six was released on Netflix (13 episodes as a batch, in 2014) and for a while that was thought to be all we’d get (of Clone Wars; Rebels was already in production). But we got a surprise in 2020, a seventh season was ordered to help launch the Disney Plus streaming service. For Ahsoka’s story [for reasons I won’t go into because Spoilers] we actually skip season six and the first four episodes of season seven. From there, though, you’ll want to watch the rest, episodes 5 through 12.

Season 7, Episode 5 Gone with a Trace [Stream on Disney+]
“If there is no path before you, create your own.”

Season 7, Episode 6 Deal No Deal [Stream on Disney+]
“Mistakes are valuable lessons often learned too late.”

Season 7, Episode 7 Dangerous Debt [Stream on Disney+]
“Who you were does not have to define who you are.”

Season 7, Episode 8 Together Again [Stream on Disney+]
“You can change who you are, but you cannot run from yourself.”

Season 7, Episode 9 Old Friends Not Forgotten [Stream on Disney+]
Season 7, Episode 10 The Phantom Apprentice [Stream on Disney+]
Season 7, Episode 11 Shattered [Stream on Disney+]
Season 7, Episode 12 Victory and Death [Stream on Disney+]

That last story arc is basically a movie. It’s impressive television. It is highly recommended and no, I won’t spoil anything in it for you.

Rebels

Clone Wars wasn’t the only show going, though. As season six of Clone Wars was wrapping up with a Netflix release, Rebels was gearing up to premiere on Disney XD. For those wondering about the chronology, the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney was finalized in October of 2012, right as season five of Clone Wars was airing. Corporate behind-the-scenes stuff and the nature of the Cartoon Network deal probably meant Clone Wars was (a least a little) doomed as soon as Disney took ownership, and probably also explains the fractured nature of Season Six [“The Lost Missions”]. But to be fair, Clone Wars was getting dark — it wasn’t a kids show anymore, and Disney no doubt thought a reboot to a new show, crew, and era would be more kid-friendly. Rebels isn’t entirely a kids show though, and wasn’t meant to be; I think their target audience was teens and tweens.⁷

Optional but recommended is Season 1, Episodes 1 and 2, Spark of Rebellion [Stream on Disney+, Part 1 and Part 2]. This two-parter will introduce you to the main cast of Rebels, and ground you well enough.

The new Ahsoka show includes several Rebels characters who are making the jump from CGI to live action. I’ve even heard it called ‘the next season of Rebels’. So there may be an argument for watching all four seasons of Rebels; if you should feel that urge later, with a whole week between episodes of Ahsoka, we should have plenty of time.

Ahsoka’s part in Rebels is mostly in Season Two — after a very brief appearance at the end of Season 1, Episode 15 Fire Across the Galaxy. Ahsoka is used very sparingly in Rebels, mostly as a background character.⁸

Ahsoka-related but not necessarily Ahsoka-focused, the first four episodes of season two can be skipped.

Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2 Siege of Lothal [Stream on Disney+, Part 1 and Part 2]
Season 2, Episode 3 The Lost Commanders [Stream on Disney+]
Season 2, Episode 4 Relics of the Old Republic [Stream on Disney+]

Even Season 2, Episode 18 Shroud of Darkness, a very Jedi-focused episode, doesn’t have a whole lot of Ahsoka’s story in it⁹, just a lot of foreshadowing. Worth a watch though and an excellent way to set up the season two finale.

Season 2, Episodes 21 and 22 Twilight of the Apprentice [Stream on Disney+, Part 1 and Part 2]

Because I’m sure you will have questions, I’d follow this immediately by Season 4, Episode 13 A World Between Worlds. We just skipped two whole seasons of story, and that kind of jump might bring up a different set of questions, but this is where we conclude the Malachor story.

The last time we see Ahsoka before her appearance in The Mandolorean is in Rebels Season 4, Episode 15 Family Reunion – and Farewell, in a end-of-series coda section [start watching at 42:00, mostly to skip SPOILERS that you might want to wait to see when you’re watching all of Rebels]. I’ll also note in 2022, Diz gave us two more bits (fine, three, whatever) featuring a Clone-Wars-era Ahsoka in Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi Episode 5, Practice Makes Perfect and Episode 6, Resolve.

I hope all those links work. I’ll be cleaning up this blog post for the rest of the day.

We’ve got word from Disney’s Twitter Account for Ahsoka that the show will premiere a day early, tomorrow at 6pm US Pacific Time.

New #Ahsoka inspired art by NickyBarkla</a> has arrived. <br><br>Don’t miss the two-episode premiere, streaming Tuesday, August 22 at 6PM PT on <a href="https://twitter.com/DisneyPlus?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/hynybbxg5B

— Ahsoka (@ahsokaofficial) August 19, 2023

It doesn’t give you a whole lot of time to catch up, but in a pinch just refer to my original tl;dr way up there at the top of the post before the break. And despite me spending three days and overworking my Disney+ account to write all this: try to just enjoy the new shows on their own merits; not everything has to carry the weight of five decades and the bloated expectations of an entitled fan base. Sometimes these are just fun sci-fi and/or space fantasy adventures, often for the kids.

¹ specifically of Dave Feloni, supervising director — and earlier in his film career both a conceptual artist and storyboard artist.

² The theatrical release was probably both to raise the profile of the show, give it a splashy premiere, but also to make some money back as the development costs for a full CGI show (esp. in 2008) was a chunk of change.

³ though from all the resources I have at hand, what is presented is in chronological order. yay consistency.

⁴ Also I’m pretty sure this episode is one of the references Respawn Games used for Coruscant when making Jedi: Survivor. There’s a big cross-Coruscant parkour chase scene in this ep.

⁵ For a long time, the whole damn burden of Star Wars was being carried by this one Cartoon Network series, back when they didn’t know Diz would buy them out. No movies were on the horizon, even the release of tie-in novels had slowed down, and tv cartoons were the whole damn franchise. In this context you can watch [Overlords], [Altar of Mortis], and [Ghosts of Mortis] . A story had to be built. But it’s not her story, necessarily, just more myth (and probably straight from George Lucas, so it’s “canon”, as much as anything is).

⁶ We’re skipping a block of episodes that starts with Season 3, Episode 10 Heroes on Both Sides [Stream on Disney+],
Season 4, Episode 14 A Friend in Need [Stream on Disney+], and finishes with a four-episode arc early in season 5: A War on Two Fronts [Stream on Disney+], Front Runners [Stream on Disney+] , The Soft War [Stream on Disney+], and Tipping Points [Stream on Disney+]. The first two introduce Ahsoka to Separatist politics and to a young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri. Lux and his planet of Onderon, are featured in the later arc as Ahsoka and other Jedi support a rebel faction on Onderon in their effort to free their world from the Separatist-friendly government that controls it. Despite also featuring (a young) Saw Guerra and having the twist that the Jedi are supposed to be merely advisors, not combatants, when re-watching these I realized it’s a good Star Wars story but these arcs don’t feel like her story.

⁷ Diz was looking to mint a few more Star Wars fans among Millennials and Gen Z while putting some gloss on the XD channel, which is like the ESPN-8 of Disney’s cable offerings.

⁸ I’m guessing here, but there is the fact that she’s a little overpowered compared to the rest, comes with her own story/baggage that the show’s writers didn’t feel like addressing on a week-in week-out basis and she actual works really well as a behind-the-scenes quest-giver type.

⁹ not a lot of Ahsoka’s story. Plenty for the new guys. It is their show after all.

So I was working on something¹ and in doing some edits/revisions, I decided I needed eight elements for a RPG and DnD-adjacent …um, thing and settled on stone, metal, water, wood, flame, wind, and guile.²

I guess I still need an eighth but its fantasy so stars and/or dragons or quintessence or… no.

No, seven is fine. That’s a decent set of six + the seventh is already a stretch; no need to go for the hail mary pass on top of what’s already a stretch.

Guile is a great word. Quite flavorful. Not used much. Has maybe a negative connotation but that’s fine too, I can work within that as a constraint.

The term I was leaning toward before finding guile was just… Magic. Generic “magic”. Super basic and boring.

What I wanted was ~Magic~ but also in the sense of Art. Tékhnē. Works. Craft. Mage-Craft. Also with a sense of invention, discovery, innovation, and science. Something to embrace spells and potions and clockwork and crafts like blacksmithing, as opposed to just the usual amorphous cosmic preexisting always-there force kinda sense to magic. Elemental Guile, which works for the project just fine.³

But man, guile is such a good word. Let’s see where else that might take us:

What if we add Guile to the ‘standard’ set of six attributes. I’d position it as the spellcasting attribute – cunning, craft, wile, artifice, insight; to be inventive, imaginative, creative, innovative, ingenious, artful; to be deft, clever, shrewd, sly, subtle; to have perception, comprehension, acuity; to devise, contrive, improvise, and invent.

Intelligence is a mix of potential, aptitude, and learned knowledge. Wisdom a mix of insight, empathy, and self-mastery. Charisma a mix of assurance, persuasion, and appeal.

I’d set Guile as being equal to any of those and equivalently relevant.

##

If I were to go back to a different set of old notes⁴, at one point I was thinking on the standard set of six stats and also, being kind of disappointed in them? At the same time, I was entertaining the random idea of writing a RPG source book using Wikipedia⁵. Possibly because I was relying on Wikipedia for a lot of preliminary research⁶. Anyway, if I go back to those notes, I found that Guile slotted right into place. Almost like I was always meant to add it.

I present these notes with some light formatting but also with the disclaimer – I’m going for a low-effort post today so these are just notes: equivalent to pre-first-draft and more about getting the ideas down on paper⁷ than getting everything formatted⁸ and in perfect prose. With that caveat I Present:

10 alternate RPG attributes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_(role-playing_games)

Strength
Endurance
Hardiness
Agility
Deftness

Resolve
Wisdom
Intelligence
Charisma
Guile

Strength
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_strength
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(running)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_training
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_exercise

Endurance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiorespiratory_fitness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-distance_running
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_exercise

Hardiness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_fitness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_density
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver#Functions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_repair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_tissue_injury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease

Agility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(ability)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_coordination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexibility_(anatomy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Physiology

Deftness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_motor_skill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-hand_coordination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidexterity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Fine_motor_memory

Resolve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience

Wisdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

Intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

Charisma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charisma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superficial_charm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_skills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

Guile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discernment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving

“Your character may have 18 INT but you, my friend, are as dumb as a bag of hammers”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning

The 5 Physical and 5 Mental Attributes can be thought of as parallel and corresponding. mostly. kinda-sort-of

Strength/Resolve
Wisdom/Endurance
Intelligence/Hardiness
Agility/Charisma
& Deftness/Guile

On Agility and Deftness: “A person with high Agility (i.e. good reflexes) will be able to put a hand up when thrown a ball; a person with low Deftness (i.e. bad hand-eye coordination) will have their hand up but not catch it”

On Endurance and Hardiness: “Endurance is running a marathon. Hardiness is surviving the flu.”

“Pick two” – Most DND abilities combine two of these traits (or aspects of two)

• ‘Constitution’ as Endurance and Hardiness
• Or ‘Strength’ as Strength and Endurance
• Dexterity as Agility & Deftness
• ‘Wisdom’ as Wisdom & Resolve
• ‘Charisma’ as Charisma & Guile
• Or ‘Intelligence’ as Intelligence & Guile

Claiming copyright over this set-of-10 would be difficult (and probably not enforceable) & so: I don’t. CC BY-SA 4.0 like the rest of the blog but I’m only asking politely; effectively as common terms in English the list is CC0. Well, “guile” isn’t that common in English anymore but that was kind of my point, way up there at the start. It’s a great word. Feel free to steal it off me.

¹ I half-remembered some notes from, I kid you not, twenty freakin’ years ago and yes, I have been transferring them from archive to archive and PC to laptop to laptop to PC and to my current rig. I was using OpenOffice (or maybe even excel?) back in 2002, instead of LibreOffice and Google Docs, but I still have them.

² Sky/Stars was the original 7th, I added Guile (over Magic) as the 8th, & then made the executive decision to pare back down to seven.

³ It is a tarot-style deck of cards and the seven elements are suits in a minor arcana. Yes, with seven suits it’ll end up as a double deck [78×2 = 156]

⁴ these are just from 2020, not 2002.

⁵ I don’t know what I was drinking at the time, but it was merely alcoholic. Not anything stronger.

⁶ …as one does. Not the best way to do research — and of course, you should find a 2nd/backup/reinforcing and perhaps better source before you rely on wiki for anything vital, but wiki is (true to name) fast and with all the cross-links and linked sources (where available), it’s a decent enough place to start.

⁷ Like most of us, I do almost everything from a keyboard into digital files but ya get me

⁸ This includes turning those links from text back into links. Ain’t nobody here got time for that, you are perfectly capable of ctrl-c ctrl-v if you really needed to get there.

I don’t know why I’ve been so muddy-brained recently but let’s document it.

No fever, no body-aches, no GI symptoms, and nothing in my head or chest. This seems to rule out most of the common bugs and viruses that roll through the population in winter, including cold and flu. I’m tired but it’s not a physically-exhausted kind of tired, and it’s not the sort that has me nodding off mid-morning after not getting enough sleep.

I’m getting plenty of sleep. I’m getting possibly too much [?] sleep.

I can ‘get by’ on six hours of sleep, when I have to. I can function 3 to 4 days that way, almost a whole work week, when I know I can catch up on the weekend. This last weekend started out like that. I went to bed early on Friday and slept 12 hours, 9 to 9. I slept well, sometimes I wake up every three hours or so but that night I was out and only got up once, after like 7½ hours (bladder), and was able to immediately get back to sleep. “Fantastic!” I think to myself, “I’ll be so productive this weekend.”

On Saturday night I went to bed at 7:30. It’s winter, the sun sets early, no big deal, and I figured my body was telling me it needed the sleep. Catching up on a sleep deficit.¹ But this still wasn’t so far out of the ordinary, and since I have in the past suffered from insomnia, I was almost happy. I missed out on a few hours when I was going to stream/binge some new TV but that was the only drawback.

Sunday I went to bed at 5:30. I was a little concerned — not at the time, at the time it was bedtime — while ‘catching up’ on sleep is normal and sleeping in is one of my favorite things about the weekends, this new thing with sleeping 12 hours a day was… unusual for me.

Now that I’m into my work week again and my 5:30am alarm and getting to work well before 7am and all that, I figured I’d go back to ‘the usual’ and not get enough sleep.² But no, not yet. With the alarm I’m getting up early enough that I can’t get 12 hours of sleep, but so far this week I’ve been getting 10½.

I’m still fairly firmly in the camp that listening to what my body needs is good. If the damn machine needs sleep, I guess I have to put up with that for a while yet, while it works to repair whatever the hell is wrong. But I’ve also read the articles about Long Covid, so I have to wonder if that’s a factor (or a new reality I’m suddenly living with). I don’t know.

And with what’s going on at work³ I shouldn’t be too surprised that I need those extra hours of sleep. And that I’m finding it hard to concentrate, or to find the enthusiasm each evening to tackle my side projects and the things I’d rather be doing over the stuff I have to do because we live in a capitalist hellscape where you have to trade hours of your life for the means to afford even basic necessities. I mean, I love my job.⁴ But there are also things I’d rather do and a few small goals I’ve set for myself for this year and the reality is: it’s still 8 hours out of my day, 40 hours every week, the treadmill that never ends.⁵

This counts as a project update. Look, it’s been a long week.

On the plus side: Whatever was wrong with me for the past week or so, I think I’m on the other side of it.⁶ I’m looking forward to getting back to the various side projects too, and just the fact that I’m looking forward to it bodes well. I’m not going to mess with my sleep by drinking an espresso or a venti iced coffee at like 3 in the afternoon⁷ but maybe this evening I have something light for dinner, like a salad, and then pull together notes and sit down at my dining room table⁸ and draw some things and map some things and write random bits of a fantasy world — at a bare minimum, my dreaming brain has had plenty of time to work behind-the-scenes on things & I should be able to tap some of that inspiration.

¹ To be fair, I’ve been running a sleep deficit since I was 14

² which would then be a good [?] thing?

³ see the last blog post; Friday of last week was rough and yeah maybe it is just work and the fact that I turn 50 this year.

⁴ “love” is too strong a word; of currently available options I find the situation workable with most other things I’d rather do and preferable over many, many others.

⁵ four day work week WHEN, already. long overdue.

⁶ not least because I’ve managed to fight off the muddy-brained feeling long enough to write this up, in a way that I hope is cogent.

⁷ at least not yet. I’m hanging onto that as an option for next week, if I have another ‘lost weekend’.

⁸ my preferred ‘workspace’ for things that aren’t work. oddly, I can’t be productive at the computer or at my desk.

I am in the habit of writing notes to myself, occasionally long ones. Initially, it was just a draft email in Outlook [not a client I like but required for work] and would be short notes along the lines of “buy butter and eggs” or “attack and dethrone god” – things to remember to do on the way home from work. But over time I moved from just bulletpointing notes to talking my way through projects like building a new computer or buying a new condo or remodeling the kitchen in the new condo, and on top of links to articles and pullquotes and tracking prices and all the rest, I would drop back into a conversational tone and write whatever my additional thoughts were.

“We can probably skimp on the processor since we’re planning on putting an absolutely ridiculous amount of RAM in this rig and also the graphics card. Well, by skimp I mean get a 65W tdp part, but still something with at least 8 cores.”

I have unfortunately adopted “We” as a pronoun. In context it makes perfect sense – these are notes to myself and so this is present me talking to future me, or at some point later when I review the notes, it is present me listening to past me, and in either case “we” are perfectly fine with this form of address.¹ My literary executor will probably think I went nuts in 2015 and will burn every metaphorical page in a metaphorical fireplace.²

The habit grew stronger in 2020 and I switched from emails to Google Docs and the notes became much more, ah… present [?] in my life? I was jotting down short story ideas before they ran away from me, alongside notes for the longer project and board game ideas and resurrected the long dormant RPG notes and (when I’m not distracted by twitter) I found myself writing more. A lot more. The archived notes file from 2021 is over 200 pages long. The file from last year is 483.

Now that Twitter is actively trying to make itself un-useful and I’m not getting the same sort of nice-distracting-side-screen vibe from the app on my phone, I find myself needing another distraction to fill out agonizingly long 8 hour shifts exploring new avocational resources to keep my mind alert, sharp and productive for my employer’s benefit.

What I will miss, maybe, is engagement. Comments are closed on this version of the blog, a decision I made several years ago, and I don’t anticipate ever enabling the feature. Diligent folks who just had to make their feelings known about a blog post could scour the page and eventually find my Twitter handle, which seemed like an acceptable compromise to me. I suppose, when I am fully done with Twitter I’ll need to update that link.³

When I am the only intended audience, writing is easy. The conversational tone I usually take makes sense, the long asides (so many asides)⁴ don’t really distract from my points because I always remember what the point was. I don’t have to find the right words to describe a state of mind or an emotional reaction because, well, it’s me. When I go back and re-read the notes, I know where my mind was at⁵ and I remember why I talked around a thing that evaded exact definition in that moment. Transferring this writing habit to the blog means we’ll encounter a few speed bumps and maybe the occasional detour, but I have a new (new-ish) daily writing habit and I might as well flex it.

This blog activity will not be replacing my habit of writing little⁶ notes-to-myself and you won’t be seeing any version of those notes here. That Google Doc is a different thing that lives in a different space, both physically and in my thinking about it. But if I can adapt that voice and tone, the one I’ve found so easy to use when talking Me-to-Me, I can maybe take what has become a mid-morning ritual and get some additional mileage out of it.

For those of you who remember, and added the RSS feed to your readers-of-choice way back in the day, I used to work retail for Barnes & Noble. Back then I would blog about the things that frustrated me at work, and since the industry was in transition [2008-2013] there was a lot to mine for content. So you might have followed the blog back in the day for the bookselling insights, or for my opinions on Comics & Manga, or for the occasional bits of analysis⁷. The current iteration of the blog isn’t like that – you might read through the new front page to get an idea of what I felt was blog-worthy, the past couple of years. Going forward, I’m not sure where this (new) new writing impulse will take me or what topics we’ll cover or discover. But if you’re game, and can put up with my annoying new habit of using “we” when I write, well: let’s find out.

¹ I live alone and have for over 12 years now and I think that may also have something to do with it.

² At least one very presumptive assumption there but we’ll leave it for dramatic effect.

³ I’ve made appropriate alternate accounts at a number of suggested socials but I haven’t found where I’m ‘landing’ quite yet.

⁴ My brain is multi-core and apparently is always running multiple threads. See, for example, the use of footnotes in stupid personal blog posts.

⁵ …Usually.

⁶ noted earlier, 483 pages in 2022.

⁷ That version of the blog is a bit of a mess because of mildly incompatible software and broken links but still ‘lives’ at archive.rocketbomber.com. And I apologize for crashing into your feed this morning via a long-forgotten RSS – but I hope you’ll stick with me for a bit longer anyway. :)

I’m not a poet – strike that, we can all be poets. But I am not a professional poet and my skills in writing verse are both under-exercised and a little rusty. But I wanted to take a little poetic license anyway and paint a mental picture for you, of a glorious fall afternoon full of color and crisp weather and quiet walks across fallen leaves in a park, or perhaps along a woodland trail.

And a glorious fall afternoon full of sunlight gives way to evening, and the slanting sunlight angling lower and lower in the sky, and a beautiful sharp, spiky sunset, until just a single glowing ember sends out a last light-house beam as it slips under that horizon. Good night and good luck.

…and that’s the feeling I’m getting being on a certain social network these days. The Titanic musicians playing our way out. We few, we lucky few, one last time unto that breach.

But the thing about sunsets: there is always a sunrise (historically and statistically speaking) so this isn’t the end, this is just a really bad day to be a Twitter employee and is one more reminder that we should probably know where the exits are, even if today is not that day. And it never hurts to have a back-up plan, maybe a space you already keep on a domain you already own.

A nice place to land when it all goes to heck. A good place to watch that final sunset.

I didn’t post anything on the actual first day of the year because
1. I didn’t actually have that much to say (apparently)
2. This isn’t going to be a new year’s resolution thing where I post every day, no matter what
3. Actual events of the day were, after waking up: some youtube; a nap, like, got a blanket off the bed and settled in and really napped; forcing myself awake because I did in fact have somewhere to be; showering and the necessary things to be out in public; spending the afternoon with my folks, and a traditional New Year’s dinner¹ —
4. and after driving home and settling in with the blanket again I didn’t feel like writing. Or blogging, anyway; if inspiration had struck I probably would have been willing to write out a story idea or scene fragment

So there, you get the play-by-play of the 1st anyway (with an extra side of thought process) on today, the 2nd, probably around 3 in the afternoon when I get home to post this and not around 8am when I actually wrote it.

This being the internet, despite a certain bias towards the new and newly-updated, the time between creation and consumption doesn’t really matter so much. My words will likely be just as valid on 2 January 2040 as they are today, except perhaps for the detail where it is chilly enough to require a blanket.

So if the goal isn’t to produce a daily diary in web log format, or to engage in daily writing exercise as part of a new year’s resolution to “write more and make it a habit”, then what the hell am I doing here?

I write every day and have for years but way too much of that has been on Twitter, particularly in the last four years or so². I need to refocus away from that platform, and I already have a blog (with its own domain name and web hosting and the CMS and *gestures broadly at everything on this page*) so doing some very rudimentary mental calculations: here I am. Again.

I still don’t have an overall site topic, or focus, like I used to when RocketBomber was about bookselling³. I have a lot of interests, I read voraciously⁴, I like to consider myself broadly literate across many categories⁵, I have a tendency to both think I am impartial while simultaneously forming strong opinions about things⁶, and if nothing else I find it particularly easy to settle into a self-reflective mode and basically just talk to myself⁷. So the topic-of-the-day could be anything, really, or nothing⁸.

The blog should be an outlet for me to share, when I feel the need to share (or overshare; see endnotes) and scratch that itch before it incubates and then ends up on Twitter as a “Buckle in folks, I need to tell you 1/X” situation. Among other things, here I have the space for all my parenthetical asides and other digressions⁹ and can perform formatting tricks that are either impossible to do even in threaded tweets, or supremely awkward given the character limits.

You might also hear more of my “authentic” voice in the blog. Editing to fit on Twitter is actually really good practice for an author (including comedians and humorists , as the constraint is a great way to find the joke in a joke) but constantly writing in headlines is not the best way to write. Even in a thread, the rhythm of 280-characters-per forces you into less-than-ideal phrasing and constructions. You can ignore that and just post your paragraphs in their entirety, unedited, and let the breaks fall where they may, but the fact that twitter will display the tweet-chunks with those breaks forces the reader into the clunky twitter rhythm anyway. This is probably the number one reason people hate Twitter threads even if agree with the author and like the points presented: reading a twitter thread is exhausting¹⁰.

You might find my ‘true’ writer’s voice and damnable habit of digression at least as exhausting. But at least here I can vary the rhythm of the writing to suit, and you can read it as a single page and not telegraphed cue-card style, one poster-board all-caps shout at a time.

That’s probably enough “nothing” for today’s post. I’ll see what topic grabs my attention for tomorrow¹¹

##

¹ traditional German, with roast pork sauerkraut, because they’re from Ohio. I’ll fix cornbread, collards, and black eyed peas at some point for myself later. Probably Julian-Calendar New Year’s, 14 January, because why not

² the last four as a daily thing but also looking at ten years total on twitter at this point. damn.

³ “RocketBomber” as the name is itself an artifact from a time when I thought I’d be blogging about science fiction. See also: archive.rocketbomber.com – or maybe not, on second thought. The words are all still there, and links to individual articles should still work, but the formatting has not adapted well to its new home and it’s a bit of a jumble at the moment.

⁴ too much of my reading is online only, I need more books. Literally more fiber (things printed on wood pulp paper) in my media diet

⁵ literacy in the age of digital print is about more than just being able to read; parsing and understanding information now also requires both some basic understanding of the visual but non-verbal ways we communicate—art and charts, sure, but also things like font choices and formatting and page layouts—and also approaching sources with healthy skepticism and a critical eye. Too often “a thing” is seen as “more true” just because the presentation was slick and the tone authoritative, actual facts aside. Literacy can also mean a certain grounding in a few of the more important fields, i.e. scientific, financial, cultural and multicultural literacies, and civics, and etiquette (online and off; rules often unwritten and never really covered well) and increasingly, being “literate” across a couple different fandoms. This endnote would really have been better as a post all on its own; I’ll drop myself a reminder to revisit the topic in a few months.

⁶ …the actual worst possible combo for writers on the internet. I only hope my self-awareness of the problem serves as possible inoculation against being “that guy”.

⁷ When writing for myself, I tend to write both first-person and in constant dialog with myself, with past-me and future-me, so much so that I often use the pronoun “we”. Like, note-to-self-style, “We should probably check and see if talking to yourself is still a symptom of something in the DSM-5”. We find it fairly easy to write in the mode, and we find it helps with planning and projects that are going to span a length of time that will require more than one “me” to accomplish. This is a mental-processes thing (not neurotypical, but I like it and it’s mine) and not an identity thing – my pronouns are still he/him. Not least because it’d be Supremely Weird to ask others to use “we” and we ain’t that special. And without access to a time machine I’m pretty sure you’ll only ever talk to one of us at a time. This is another endnote that would have been better as a stand-alone post and I fear that if I continue to use endnotes this will continue to come up as an issue.

⁸ Today’s post—this post—might be a good example of what “nothing” from me looks like. I hope you like the content because if nothing else, I can guarantee a lot of “nothing”

⁹ exempli gratia, vide supra

¹⁰ obscure history threads are an exception. I love me some obscure history threads. Twitter-threads-as-a-medium seems all but custom designed for ‘em

¹¹ If you’d like my take on a particular topic, perhaps an expansion on a point in one of these end notes, you can let me know on Twitter. Of course on Twitter. obviously.